


Conquering the Infinite

by squintlovely



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: M/M, fucked up soulmates that no one asked for, is that a trope? it should be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-02
Packaged: 2019-08-14 18:13:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16497698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squintlovely/pseuds/squintlovely
Summary: Ra's al Ghul gives Jeremiah the ability to see worlds beyond their own, adding fuel to his obsession with Bruce that seems destined to repeat itself in every timeline.





	Conquering the Infinite

**Author's Note:**

> Jeremiah's POV set during the season 4 finale right after their GCPD breakout.

The thing about being crazy was that it was all a matter of perspective. Perspective was of course apart of the subjective and therefore a contributing factor towards the ever-mercurial myth that was humanity’s concept of truth. Truth. What a disgusting abstraction. A philosophical ideology chased by narcissistic dreamers who want to believe that their lives have meaning; that they themselves are in pursuit of some grand adventure grounded by the moral compass of their personal truths as fed to them by their governments, their media, their textbooks, and their gods. Pathetic. How could anything be considered true when there were entire universes that paralleled their own? Did truth have any bearing on morality when it could be separated across dimensions? Moreover, what was morality anyway but that which had been defined by the world at present? A world that one was born to and bound by.

No. Jeremiah did not trouble himself with the mundanities of truth. A saint in one world, a killer in another. What difference did it make? No, there was only the Now and that Now which had been gifted to him was bountiful indeed. For his was a Now of plenty. A Now of possibility and a Now of promise. Before this, he had been stumbling in the dark, blind to anything but his own limited trajectory. If he had an ego, it might have pained him to admit that he hadn’t known his true potential; that he hadn’t known Bruce’s true potential. For what was one without the other? He’d known the second he’d laid eyes on him that Bruce was a kindred spirit. That they were of like minds. Two sides of the same coin. He’d thought perhaps that he and Jerome were part of such pithy expressions: Night and Day, Fire and Water, Light and Dark. But no. No, he and Jerome were simply two halves of one soul and that soul was bound to none other than Bruce Wayne himself. 

That he might have been required to share any part of Bruce with his now deceased brother rankled him. The idea of Jerome’s grimy hands around the perfect column of Bruce Wayne’s throat made Jeremiah want to topple the very foundations of the city his disgusting brother had tramped across. Every building that Jerome had walked into or passed by, every storefront window he’d stopped to smile his scarred face into, was one that would come crumbling down. This Gotham would have no memory of the man his brother had been or the monster he had tried to become. Not by the time Jeremiah was through. Even Bruce would forget or maybe he would conflate the two of them in his memory. That was fine. So long as his brother stayed buried. So long as his legacy became Jeremiah’s to mold into something shiny and new. Well, maybe not new. Not according to Ra’s al Ghul, but certainly shiny and familiar.

Bridging the spatial gap between time and space was not as hard as it sounded. Not if you were the Demon’s Head and could open up the gates of the mind that linked the soul. The mystic arts and science. Such beautiful possibilities that Jeremiah would leave to Ra’s. Now that his eyes had been opened to the other side and all the lives he could be leading, there was no need to chase anything except what was right in front of him. “Bruce, my friend,” he purred with a liquid cool to his voice that sent a visible shiver through the trussed up boy he sat astride. Even with a black bag over his head, Bruce still found a way to look displeased as he sat there in the back of the van that was currently transporting them towards the start of their destiny.

“You really mustn’t struggle. I don’t plan on hurting you. Not before the main event, of course.” The smile that stretched across his face was far from manic. Jerome had been manic. Jeremiah on the other hand felt a serenity that had only just begun to blossom with the gas but was now in full effect thanks to Ra’s al Ghul’s gift. Even through the leather of a gloved hand wrapped around Bruce’s throat, Jeremiah could feel the lifeline that thudded across infinity. He wanted to chase that heartbeat into eternity; their lives on repeat, destined to play out again and again and again one forever entwined with the other. The flex of his fingers coiled, a python grip that was as much predatory hunger as it was a proprietorial squeeze. Anything to flood Bruce Wayne’s senses with something that would make that heartbeat flutter more violently. A flapping of bat’s wings trapped in a pretty cage of bone and flesh. He could hear him now: the man that Bruce would become. In that strained gasp for air, Jeremiah could hear the death rattle of the boy who would soon become something more.

But not yet.

That final, desperate buck of Bruce’s body trying to dislodge the one on top of him made Jeremiah relent. The wheezing gulps of air he allowed Bruce were muffled through the black bag’s fabric and Jeremiah watched as it grew darker still with the dampness of recycled breath. In another world, maybe he never bothered with the bag at all. Maybe he got to watch the panic and the terror flood the perfect creature beneath him as those blue eyes dilated with the inevitability of death. Perhaps Bruce would have been more grateful to him then if he could see the fondness in Jeremiah’s expression instead of the contempt with which he felt the boy pushing him with. The bound hands shoved like they had the power to do something, but Jeremiah only pressed in closer, invading the space that was never really Bruce’s at all but theirs. Everything between them would be shared now. This city, their bodies, their every breaths including the ones Bruce was still trying to catch.

“You don’t trust me,” he observed with a tut, the pout dripping from his words since Bruce couldn’t see it himself. Jeremiah was admittedly disappointed in the violent reaction. How many more times would he have to promise to spare him before Bruce would come around?

“Why should I?” The words were spat out with the kind of poison Jeremiah wanted to lap from Bruce’s tragic lips. How many times had Bruce been teasingly kissed by death only to have life instead breathe itself back into his body? All those near-misses that could have taken him prematurely from Jeremiah. He was that life which had been given back to Bruce. It was through his perseverance alone that their story had not come to an end before it could begin. Every time he felt the panic of something, someone, in danger it was Bruce whose life he gifted one of his own to. How could he have known that his whole world was not just outside of his bunker but would one day occupy the entirety of it with his presence alone? He’d been so naïve then.

He’d prove it to Bruce. He would give him back that which had been temporarily taken from him. Who else on this Earth which was simply an echo of all the Earths that had come before it could follow Bruce into the catacombs of death and bring him back alive? "Because my dear friend,” Jeremiah sighed with all the wistful abandon of a man who had loved a thousand lifetimes worth of love and come back tired from the journey that always seemed to be more chase than pilgrimage, “to kill you now would mean starting all over again and I’ve only just found you. I’ve only just glimpsed what we could become.”

The sinewy body beneath his own grew still and taut. The thread of fate had finally reached its breaking point and Jeremiah saw that he had the potential to mold their futures in what he did next. This was the tension that they would crave for the rest of their lives. “We will be legends, Bruce.” They weren’t just empty promises either. Jeremiah had seen it with his own inward gaze. The Bruce whose lithe form he was straddling was just a shell. A likeness of all the Bruces who had come before him, trapped in that alleyway of heartache and pain. This Bruce hadn’t yet learned to live but Jeremiah would open the doors to Purpose. They would find it in each other just as he’d seen himself do time and time again thanks to Ra’s visions. “This city will set the stage for a beautiful ballet and we will do this dance for all of eternity.”

Again, Bruce’s voice was like a knife’s edge as he grit out, “What dance?”

They were words that titillated him. Finally, Bruce was playing the game. That wayward curiosity that would allow him to ensnare the boy into a trap of violence and lust. That was the feeling Jeremiah could feel rising in him. It was something carnal. Something primordial that had been engrained in him since he first let Bruce’s hand slide into his own during that first fateful exchanging of names. How many lifetimes had they done this and how many times had they been allowed to escape their fates?

No. No, he wouldn’t think on that. What mundanity they might have fallen into in a world without the clashing of their savage love for one another. Jeremiah wanted no part in the complacency that would have driven them both to stagnation. In this they would constantly be growing. There would be no room for idling which was the true death among men. “We are a living history, Bruce.” The tapestry of their accomplishments would be written across the city. It would be the canvas on which they would fight and fuck and follow each other upon. It would start tonight and grow until every corner of Gotham was laced with potential.

If Bruce were frowning, Jeremiah could not see it. Not yet anyway, but by drawing up the damp fabric of the hood, he could see other things that demanded his attention. The elegant column of Bruce’s throat was something he would come back to again and again. They would both go for the jugular. It would be their nature to have and to hold that vital part of each other. His thumb traced the lifeline that pulsed an erratic rhythm against the leather of his gloves, watching the living contrast that was Bruce Wayne as the boy tried to keep his expression stoic as Jeremiah’s other hand began to push the dark fabric further up. A pointed chin, a grim mouth, a nose that sucked in its first lungful of fresh air since they’d escaped the police station. All of those things were revealed and each one of them became objects of fascination for Jeremiah’s hungry mouth which he leveled near Bruce’s own.

The dying proximity between them was the final barrier left to tear down and the anticipation was a thing that swelled in them both. Bruce could deny it all he wanted but he felt the body beneath his own tremble with the untouched potential that they were standing on the edge of. When Jeremiah got his first taste of those lips, it was like running his tongue against the softness of peach fuzz. Lint and sweat and fear were ripe on Bruce’s mouth as the boy flinched away from him with a gasp that sounded stuttered and wanton.

“Darling,” Jeremiah whispered in a way that made Bruce seem to simultaneously shudder and sigh. Every panted breath between them was like reclaimed oxygen; too much would poison them and not enough would kill. “Where are you trying to go?” 

“Jeremiah—please—” Bruce croaked like he had had the vision too; as if clever little Bruce Wayne had seen for himself what they would become and was too scared to embrace the promise of forever that was about to be sealed in the most intimate way Jeremiah knew.

“I will chase you across infinity, Bruce,” he said with careful deliberation as that hood was finally pulled off so that the wild blue eyes beneath could widen and dilate in the van’s fluorescent light. When his thumb traced the line of spit his tongue had left behind, there was no mistaking that the well of Bruce’s gaze had gone black with something other than fear. Their souls were entangled, threaded together like braided cords that looped across fathomless timelines. How many times had they killed each other before they kissed? At least once. If only in this world, they will have at least had this once.

As Jeremiah leaned in, one hand on the column of Bruce’s flexing throat and his other in the dark hair that felt more like a leash than thing to pet through, the inevitable became clear between them. “I will chase you across infinity,” he echoed into the sea of all the other worlds that could have been, extinguishing them with every inch he conquered until their lips touched with each word, “and that’s a threat. Not a promise.” It was bruising and it was rough. It was a clash of teeth and tongues and every strained noise Jeremiah could swallow of Bruce’s useless struggle and when the fight in Bruce turned to sweet surrender, Jeremiah took those sounds too and he gave them back so that he could fill Bruce Wayne with something other than tragedy; giving him instead the makings of a great and terrible purpose they would both be responsible for until time itself wilted into nothingness.


End file.
